Month: October 2023

Microsoft Patch Tuesday security updates for October 2023 fixed three actively exploited zero-day vulnerabilities.

Microsoft Patch Tuesday security updates for October 2023 addressed a total of 103 vulnerabilities in Microsoft Windows and Windows Components; Exchange Server; Office and Office Components; ASP.NET Core and Visual Studio; Azure; Microsoft Dynamics; and Skype for Business. Three of the flaws fixed by Microsoft were actively exploited vulnerabilities.

13 of the 13 flaws addressed by the IT giant are rated Critical and 90 are rated Important in severity. The number of fixed vulnerabilities is the second largest month this year.  

The three actively exploited zero-day vulnerabilities in today’s updates are:

CVE-2023-36563 – Microsoft WordPad Information Disclosure Vulnerability

An attacker can exploit this issue to disclose NTLM hashes.

“To exploit this vulnerability, an attacker would first have to log on to the system. An attacker could then run a specially crafted application that could exploit the vulnerability and take control of an affected system,” reads the advisory published by Microsoft. “Additionally, an attacker could convince a local user to open a malicious file. The attacker would have to convince the user to click a link, typically by way of an enticement in an email or instant message, and then convince them to open the specially crafted file.”

Once the attacker has obtained the NTLM hashes, an attacker can crack them.

CVE-2023-41763  – Skype for Business Elevation of Privilege Vulnerability

An attacker can exploit this flaw to view some sensitive information (Confidentiality) but not all resources within the impacted component may be exposed.

Exploiting this vulnerability could allow the disclosure of NTLM hashes.

CVE-2023-44487 – HTTP/2 protocol denial of service flaw, it has been exploited in the wild since August 2023.

The complete list of the addressed flaws is available here:

https://www.zerodayinitiative.com/blog/2023/10/10/the-october-2023-security-update-review

Follow me on Twitter: @securityaffairs and Facebook and Mastodon

Pierluigi Paganini

(SecurityAffairs – hacking, Microsoft Patch Tuesday)

The post Microsoft Patch Tuesday updates for October 2023 fixed three actively exploited zero-day flaws appeared first on Security Affairs.

Another major earthquake rattled western Afghanistan on Wednesday, just days after one of the world’s deadliest earthquakes killed more than 2,400 people and levelled thousands of homes in the area.

Below are some facts about the pledges of humanitarian aid made to Afghanistan so far, as U.N. agencies try to assess the damage and casualties in Herat province.

The European Union pledged 3.5 million euros ($3.71 million)in emergency humanitarian aid funding, it said in a statement, adding a new allocation to the 2.5 million euros that will be available for humanitarian partners already carrying out relief operations on the ground.

Currently, the main needs are for emergency shelter, medical relief items, and access to safe drinking water and sanitation in an area that has been recently affected by droughts, it said.

The statement said the new assistance came in addition to the 89 million euros in humanitarian aid already allocated in 2023 for humanitarian organisations in Afghanistan.

Abu Dhabi’s Zayed Bin Sultan Al Nahyan charitable and humanitarian foundation has provided emergency aid in coordination with the ministry of foreign affairs, including food, medical aid, and other supplies

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The U.N. humanitarian coordinator has approved a $5 million emergency reserve allocation from the Afghanistan Humanitarian Fund (AHF).

It said its Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) will launch and fully process the allocation within 24 hours, with eligible partners able to utilize their grants effective from Oct. 9.

The AHF allocations will be depend on receiving additional donor resources, it said, adding that the U.N. partners will also develop an emergency appeal which will be a subset of the existing 2023 humanitarian response plan.

Pakistan, Iran and China have pledged to send in food, blankets, medicines, tents and funds.

Pakistan’s Prime Minister Anwar ul Haq Kakar said that Kabul had specifically asked for medical teams, field hospitals, tents and blankets, adding that all the requested items were being dispatched on Monday afternoon, with more relief goods to follow.

Iranian Foreign Minister Amir Abdullahian promised humanitarian aid and expressed his readiness to cooperate with Afghanistan, according to a statement.

The Chinese Red Cross Society has pledged $200,000 in aid which will go to the Afghan Red Crescent, according to Chinese state run news agency Xinhua.

Turkey’s foreign office said in a statement it was ready to provide support for the recovery efforts in the affected areas.

($1 = 0.9429 euros)

Russia, which was competing with Bulgaria and Albania for two open spots allocated to the region, received 83 votes in its favor from the UN General Assembly’s 193 members.

Poland’s army chiefs resign on eve of parliamentary elections raising considerable concern about the implications.

Have you ever read the Hamas charter?

It’s worth taking a break from the unrelenting, tragic news to better understand the founding document of the group whose attack plunged Israelis and Palestinians into their current hell. 

Founding documents are aspirational. It took well over 100 years for the United States to begin to live up to “All men are created equal.” And Israel, even within its pre-1967 borders, is still lurching toward upholding “the full social and political equality of all its citizens without distinction of race, creed or sex” promised in its Declaration of Independence. 

Similarly, a close reading of Hamas’s charter, which was created in 1987 and revised in 2017, explains a lot about its decision to slaughter innocent Jewish civilians, and unleash a reaction that has inevitably claimed innocent Palestinian lives as well.

Hamas was founded in 1987 as an Islamic fundamentalist party — an offshoot, really, of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood. In 2006, a year after Israel withdrew its armed forces and settlers from the Gaza Strip in what is widely known as the disengagement, Hamas won legislative elections, beating the rival Fatah party of Mahmoud Abbas, 74 seats to 45. A year later, it launched a bloody military campaign against Fatah, and took complete control of Gaza. 

After Hamas’s takeover, Israel imposed a blockade on Gaza, controlling travel and trade in and out of the coastal enclave. Hamas, which the United States, Israel, the European Union, Canada, Egypt, and Japan designate as a terrorist organization, had by 2006 conducted terror attacks in Israel that killed 506 and wounded thousands. After the blockade, the number of attacks plummeted. 

But Hamas has never changed its aspirations to wrest control of all of Israel by killing its Jews— a goal you will see clearly when you read the Hamas charter, as I did on Tuesday. 

The first version of the charter, adopted in 1988, begins with a preamble. Only instead of “We-the-People,” it reads: “Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it, just as it obliterated others before it.”

The 36 articles that follow are buttressed by quotes from the Quran and lessons of the Prophet Muhammed … as interpreted by the militant Islamists of Hamas. 

After establishing the primacy of Islam, the charter pivots to removing Jews from historic Palestine. “Nothing in nationalism is more significant or deeper than in the case when an enemy should tread Moslem land,” states Article 12. 

The charter’s description of Jews echoes millennia of antisemitic tropes.

“With their money, they took control of the world media,” reads Article 22, “news agencies, the press, publishing houses, broadcasting stations, and others.”

The 9000-word document blames Jews for the French and Communist revolutions, World War I and II, the Rotary Club and the United Nations, “ to enable them to rule the world through them.”

“There is no war going on anywhere,” it reads, “without having their finger in it.”

The charter directs the killing of Jews, drawing on a hadith, or prophetic saying: “The Day of Judgment will not come about until Muslims fight Jews and kill them. Then, the Jews will hide behind rocks and trees, and the rocks and trees will cry out: ‘O Moslem, there is a Jew hiding behind me, come and kill him.’”

In 2017, Hamas issued a revised charter, which softens its Islamist rhetoric somewhat. While maintaining the right to Palestine “from the river to the sea,” this new version accepts the idea of a Palestinian state in territories occupied by Israel since the 1967 War — the so-called two state solution. 

Analysts say the group’s continued loss of popularity among Gazans — even in 2006 it won only a plurality of the total votes cast, 44% — forced the changes.

The new charter states that Hamas’s conflict is with Zionism, not Jews.

The post The truth of Hamas is in its charter appeared first on The Forward.

PHOENIX (AP) — Kari Lake asked for a show of hands.

Who’s been canceled? Who’s lost friends? Has strained relations with family? Been indicted? Sued for defamation?

“If your hand did not go up in any of that, then I do think you need to work a little harder. I really do,” Lake told an adoring crowd of Michigan Republicans gathering last month on Mackinac Island.

Lake launched a U.S. Senate campaign for an Arizona seat in a splashy Scottsdale rally Tuesday, having never conceded that she lost last year’s race for Arizona governor. She is trying out new messages and courting the support of national Republicans she’s insulted in the past. But the former television news host isn’t backing down on the things that made her a star on the far right — her combativeness with perceived enemies, her fealty to Donald Trump and her willingness to defend his election lies.

That worries some Republicans who fear she will cost them a race that could decide control of the Senate.

“Kari Lake can win, but she’s going to have to run a different campaign than she ran two years ago, and she’s going to have to become a serious candidate who talks about serious issues that everyday Republican and independent voters care about,” said Chris Baker, an Arizona-based Republican political consultant. “And she hasn’t done a lot of that this year.”

At her rally Tuesday, Lake didn’t concede she lost the last election, but didn’t say it was stolen and made only a brief mention of it during a nearly 50-minute-long speech. She said she’s “never going to walk away from the fight to restore honest elections.”

“We did everything right, and we saw the disaster of election day in Arizona,” Lake said. “Sometimes when things don’t go the way we expect, we find ourselves questioning and asking why … I think God has bigger plans for us.”

She heaped praise on Trump, who recorded a video endorsement that was played at the rally, and repeatedly attacked the media, calling journalists covering her event “fake news fools.”

“When I’m back in the White House, I need strong fighters like Kari in the Senate,” Trump said.

Lake also offered conciliatory words for voters who disagree with her, a sharp contrast with her last campaign, when she didn’t want support from establishment Republicans, even after she defeated them in the GOP primary.

“I may disagree with Arizonans who voted for Joe Biden,” Lake said. “But I don’t think you’re a threat to democracy. You are a citizen just like me.”

After once calling Kentucky Sen. Mitch McConnell an “old bat” and saying he needed to be replaced as Republican leader, Lake now says she would support him if she’s elected. Last year, she called abortion “the ultimate sin” and supported a near-total ban on abortion in Arizona. Now, she says she wouldn’t endorse a federal abortion ban.

National Republican leaders think a GOP candidate could take advantage of what could be a three-way race if Sen. Kyrsten Sinema seeks reelection. Sinema, a former Democrat who became an independent last year, is preparing for a campaign but has not said whether she will seek a second term. U.S. Rep. Ruben Gallego is likely to have the Democratic nomination locked up.

Lake met recently with Sen. Steve Daines of Montana, who leads the GOP’s Senate campaign work as chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, and saw several other GOP senators during a trip to Washington. Daines has publicly urged Lake to focus on the future instead of relitigating past elections.

A former television news anchor for nearly three decades in the Phoenix market, Lake was already known locally but had no national profile when she walked away from her career in 2021, declared “journalism is dead,” and took a sledgehammer to televisions showing cable newscasts.

Right up to Election Day, she embraced Trump, appeared with right-wing figures like Steve Bannon and blasted establishment Republicans, including the late Sen. John McCain.

She lost the governor’s race by less than 1 point. About four in 10 Arizona voters in the 2022 election said they were “very concerned” that Lake’s views were too extreme, according to AP VoteCast, a survey of U.S. voters. She lost 11% of Republicans. About 63% of independents and 96% of Democrats backed the winner, Democrat Katie Hobbs.

But Lake became a national figure on the far right with her television appearances and her defense of Trump’s election falsehoods.

In the months since, Lake has traveled extensively to speak to Republican groups around the country, her remarks focused largely on her fraudulent election claims. Her frequent trips to Iowa, the state where she was born but also the host of the leadoff presidential caucuses, have raised eyebrows in political circles. Some have floated her as a running mate for Trump, the front-runner for the 2024 GOP presidential nomination.

She sued Maricopa County, claiming election officials deliberately created printer malfunctions to cause her to lose. She lost, and her unsuccessful appeals have bounced through the court system, all the way up to the Arizona Supreme Court.

She also was sued for defamation by Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer, a Republican official who says he has faced death threats because she lied about how he conducted the election.

Last month she was back in court for her third election-related case, where she watched as her lawyer argued that Arizona’s public records law entitles her to see copies of signed vote-by-mail envelopes. She claims reviewing the signatures would allow her to prove that ballots were counted that should not have been, drawing parallels to an unprecedented partisan recount of ballots conducted by Trump supporters on behalf of state Senate Republicans following the 2020 election.

Her fights over the 2020 and 2022 elections have only further endeared her to Arizona Republicans, who nominated a slate of Trump-backed candidates who spread election lies and went on to lose in the midterms. She enters the Senate race as an immediate front-runner in the GOP primary, where she’ll face Pinal County Sheriff Mark Lamb.

Stung by unexpected Senate losses last year, Republicans in Washington have vowed to take an active role in primaries to help more electable candidates earn the GOP nomination. Lake so far has received a warm, if tentative, reception in the nation’s capital, where influential officials who control the party’s money and priorities are signaling that they’re open to embracing her if she’s willing to broaden her base of support.

“We have had productive conversations with Kari Lake and her team,” Daines said in a statement. “She is a talented campaigner with an impressive ability to fire up the grassroots. We have a clear path to victory with two Democrats on the ballot in Arizona.”

The NRSC has not ruled out endorsing Lake in the primary, according to a person familiar with the organization’s strategy who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss private deliberations. Support from the NRSC would potentially open up a lucrative funding stream and signal to donors that Lake has the support of key GOP senators.

After harshly criticizing McConnell during her gubernatorial campaign, she now says she would support the Republican leader in Congress because he would be preferable to Democratic leader Chuck Schumer.

“If the choice is between McConnell and Schumer, who are you going to vote for? It’s not going to be Schumer,” Lake told the AP.

That’s a change of tone from a year ago, when she called McConnell an “old bat” at a campaign rally and said it was time to replace him as the GOP leader with Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas. Even as recently as August, she appeared to poke fun at McConnell freezing up during a press conference.

“I don’t even think he can control what comes out of his mouth anymore,” Lake said on Bannon’s podcast. “I mean there’s something going on right now with him.”

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Associated Press writers Steve Peoples in New York and Linley Sanders in Washington contributed to this report.